Eyal Weizman, whose exhibition Decolonizing Architecture (developed together with Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal) was presented at REDCAT in 2010, returns to Los Angeles to discuss his ongoing research on Forensic Architecture. For this lecture at the REDCAT lounge, Weizman talks about “a set of investigations and critical reflections that employ the term forensis to designate a condition by which intensified forms of material and spatial analysis transform the ways political struggles are understood and engaged with. Architecture is employed as a field of knowledge and as a mode of interpretation, one not only concerned with buildings but rather with an ever-changing set of relations between people and things across multiple scales: from the human body to human induced climate change, from the scale of a single home to the scale of the earth as the ultimate home, understood as both a planetary scale architectural construction site and a potential ruin. The lecture will review recent projects and investigations in Palestine, Yemen, Pakistan, former Yugoslavia, and Guatemala and will cover controversial topics such as the David Irving Trial. The courts in which forensics is asked to perform embody of course the logic of the states that established them. But forensis could become a counter hegemonic practice that could invert the relation between individuals and states, helping to challenge state and corporate violence and the tyranny of their truth.”

Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011, he has directed the European Research Council funded project, Forensic Architecture, an institute that focuses on the place of architecture in international humanitarian law. He is also a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. His most recent books include "Mengele's Skull" (with Thomas Keenan at Sternberg Press, 2012), "Forensic Architecture" (dOCUMENTA13 notebook, 2012), and "The Least of all Possible Evils" (Nottetempo 2009, Verso 2011). He has worked with a variety of NGOs worldwide and was member of the B'Tselem board of directors. He also serves on the advisory boards of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, and the Human Rights Project at Bard in New York.